Clive, Clive...I'm mystified by your post on The Lives of Others. I've always thought of you as a man of discernment and taste. So I don't understand how you could you write this: "[T]he characterisation is one-dimensional, the pacing is ponderous in the extreme and the storyline is full of unexplained holes."

One of my journalistic heroes is John Sweeney. A one-man justice machine, he is one of the few people in (to define it broadly) public life who is entirely a force for good, righting some terrible injustices. His most recent triumph was the case of Angela and Ian Gray (the couple wrongly convicted of poisoning their child with salt), which he wrote about in this Sunday Times piece.

If it means that the BBC no longer bothers to waste an entire Saturday night televising this pointlessly stupid piece of rubbish, then no one will be able to say that the war was entirely without benefit.

Blair is misunderstood even in his own county, let alone in the U.S. He has been a traditional tax and spend social democrat — no more, no less — but with the political genius to make that ideology popular with the mass middle classes who decide elections.